Monthly Archives: November 2012

Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions:

Am I pushing the people on my team too hard?

Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough?

These two nag at me all the time.

There are days when I marvel at what Mozzers have accomplished, overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of work delivered. And there are days when I wonder how we can keep customers at all given the failures, setbacks, and occasional poor decisions we make (usually garnered from the unfair perspective of hindsight). Today, I felt both of those simultaneously.

Over the holiday weekend, Geraldine took me to see Lincoln. I’d watched a clip aired during the Daily Show last week that had me excited to see the film, and Fred Wilson’s post sealed the deal.

That clip contained the following quote:

Euclid’s first common notion is this: ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.’ That’s a rule of mathematical reasoning. It’s true because it works. Has done and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is self-evident. You see, there it is. Even in that 2,000 year old book of mechanical law, it is a self-evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern?

I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number should be considerably larger. As a first step, I figured I’d check SEOmoz.org’s own referral traffic (via Google Analytics) to see what our distribution curve looks like. It’s visualized below:

Whoa. Less than 10% of the referring domains to SEOmoz send more than 79% of the referring visits. That’s a shocking distribution.

But, it could be that we’re an outlier, so I looked at the traffic distribution for a few other sites.

Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this:

Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page

Determine which are easy to build/test

Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them

Allow winning changes to remain

Unfortunately, this process diminishes what CRO can achieve. It’s my belief that conversion rate optimization needs to be a practice that’s separate from funnel optimization or landing page optimization (though it can certainly encompass those). But CRO is bigger and broader, and it deserves to have influence on every part of the business – from the product to the customer service to the marketing and beyond.

We’re trying out a new format of video at Moz (which we may do more of on the Moz Youtube Channel), and in this 19 minute one, I use a presentation I’ve given a couple times this year against a whiteboard backdrop to tackle the big picture of CRO.

Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve all experienced.

So how do we build a culture where emails are both A) effective communication tools and B) positive experiences that fit with the company culture?

There’s no simple answer, but there are a few things we’ve done at Moz to help. Many of these are experiments still in process, so they may not work perfectly, but hopefully they’ll help inspire or inform the thinking and applications at your companies.

I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser.

This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A Remix that changed my preconceptions about what it means to be creative, what an inventor is, and how brilliant new ideas come to be. Much like Simon Sinek’s talk on Getting to Why, this video has the potential to be a touchstone for many of us who operate in the fields of marketing and technology.

This week at Distilled’s Searchlove conference in Boston (which, BTW, is probably the best marketing content I’ve seen at an event, period, including Mozcon – yes, I’m a little jealous), I presented the slide deck below on earning marketing love:

For those of you who’ve seen me present this year, or who’ve followed my decks on Slideshare, you can probably tell that this one’s a significant upgrade from the past, and an obvious amalgamation of prior content. This is also the very first deck I outsourced – I didn’t actually create most of the graphics, the transitions, or the visuals. Instead, I used a design firm in Seattle, Zum Communications, to do the bulk of the work.

There’s a constant fight raging at Moz, and every other scaling startup I’ve seen. On one side are the forces of corporateness – trying to make the workplace a more stodgy, inauthentic, TPS-reports-to-be-filed place. On the other are the defenders of humanity and authenticity – the people who built the company and are, by and large, doing their best to make it a good place to work.

Unfortunately, those defenders have an ugly bucket of hurdles to overcome:

The long-standing tradition of corporate workplaces to be soul-sucking vacuums

The momentum that people who’ve worked at those companies bring with them

Laws, regulations, and policies that get more stringent with size and require

Increased risks (legal and otherwise) of abuse that come with scale

History (that one time that one bad thing happened? Yeah, that’s why no one can have nice things anymore)

Non-culture fit employees, who, rather than being let go (see this graphic), are kept on and change the company

Inattentiveness to slow, subtle shifts that are making things worse

Against these odds, there’s an unlikely and volatile ally in the fight for authenticity – humor.